


seasonally

by noctelle



Category: Fire Emblem: If | Fire Emblem: Fates
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-28
Updated: 2017-01-28
Packaged: 2018-09-20 10:11:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9486701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noctelle/pseuds/noctelle
Summary: The summer before his senior year of high school, Leo does some soul-searching.





	

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this last summer bc i was at that stage of self-discovery and leo's problems = my problems

They're sitting in front of the TV mashing buttons on a Sunday afternoon and Takumi's about to send him flying off the screen again, when Leo says, “Wait.”

“What?” Takumi’s eyes are glued to the screen.

“Have you ever had a crush?”

Takumi puts his controller down, turning to look over at him incredulously. “What kind of question is _that_?”

“Well, have you?” Leo says. He's bored, and a little curious.

It's the last week of June, and the day before Takumi boards a plane going hundreds of miles away for three weeks. Leo has nothing better to do, so, naturally, he spends his afternoons playing fighting games on Takumi's old PS3 like they used to before their junior year rolled around.

Takumi frowns and scrunches up his eyebrows like he’s thinking hard. “There was Hana in fifth grade,” he says eventually, “but she punched me when I confessed to her on the playground.”

Leo winces in sympathy. “That’s all? Nothing since then?”

“I don’t remember. Where did all this come from, anyway?” Takumi shoots back, suddenly defensive.

“I don’t know.” It’s the truth. He's had too much time to think lately, and that's never a good thing.

Leo knows that, technically, he’s supposed to be agonizing about his future and the impending doom of college apps, but mostly he’s just been brooding over his own barren existence. Somehow, that led him to the pitiful subject of his love life, and he's finally come to the conclusion that he’d like to experience love. To love and to be loved.

He wonders if Takumi feels the same way, or if he plain doesn't care and Leo is worrying about nothing like he always is.

“Okay, who is it?” Takumi wonders.

"No one," Leo says, and the words sound lame, even to him. "I don't know."

Takumi doesn't look convinced, absently turning his controller over and over in his hands. Their characters linger on the screen, unmoving.

"There must be someone on your mind."

“I've been thinking lately,” Leo says, tentatively, and Takumi nods. “About...stuff. Like love. What it means to be in love, I mean.”

Takumi frowns, not understanding. “Right,” he says anyway.

They lapse into silence. Leo can almost see the gears in Takumi's mind turning, trying to figure out what he means.

Leo drops his controller and flops back onto the bed, eyes trailing over the mess of textbooks and mangas and video game cartridges cluttering the room. He suddenly notices, not knowing why, that Takumi’s room has barely changed since he first came over in elementary school. With a pang of nostalgia, he remembers when they'd used to spend hours playing Pokemon here, sprawled out over the bed and getting excited over beating the Elite Four for the first time.

It’s stupid, but the memory is strangely soothing.

“Are you _sure_ you’ve never liked anyone since fifth grade?” Leo tries again.

“Yes,” Takumi retorts.

Of course. He shouldn't be surprised that Takumi, who still has no idea one of his best friends has been completely infatuated with him ever since they were kids, is completely oblivious to love.

“Oh,” is all he can say in response.

“Why do you care so much?” Takumi sits up. He sounds slightly annoyed, Leo thinks, and decides to drop it.

“Just wondering, is all,” he says, and that’s that.

\-------------------

The next day, Takumi and his family leave for their cousins’ house in San Francisco and the sun-drenched beaches of California, and Leo finds himself alone for the first time that summer.

He doesn’t know why that bothers him as much as it does. It really shouldn’t. Even Elise was fine after she and Sakura tearfully hugged good-bye, and they’ve been practically inseparable since the second grade, when they found an injured baby bird on the side of the street and spent weeks taking care of it together.

Halfway through July, Camilla stops by to check up on him and Elise even though she's about to leave for Europe with her friends. As an old tradition, the three of them go out for ice cream, but Leo’s has already turned into a sticky, gooey mess in less than two minutes under the sun.

“By the way, you might not want to hear this,” Camilla begins, when Elise is busying herself with layers of chocolate syrup and sprinkles, too far away to hear. Leo automatically tenses.

“Tell me,” he says reflexively.

“My friends and I finally found an apartment.”

She doesn’t have to say the words straight out, but the apologetic expression she gives him is loud and clear.

“Why didn’t you tell us earlier?” Leo says slowly, carefully, trying to keep his voice neutral. He should be excited for her, he tells himself, and yet… “Have you told Elise?”

“I didn’t know how to break the news to you,” Camilla says, “and no, not yet.”

But then Elise joins them, and his older sister abruptly stops talking. Leo stays silent the entire time, but Camilla seems unaffected, nodding at all the right places and humming quietly to herself.

Even though he should have expected it, his fragile seventeen-year-old heart feels betrayed anyway. It certainly hurts far more than when Xander moved out with his girlfriend, Charlotte, at the time, because he’d already left for uni when Leo was in elementary school and hadn’t called or visited nearly as much as Camilla had.

But to be fair, the only semi-good memory Leo has of his brother is of sitting in front of the piano together when he was four years old, Xander teaching him to play Fur Elise and getting upset when he kept messing up.

That evening, when Camilla’s at the front door with her suitcases, Leo says, “You’re really leaving for good?”

“Not _for good_ ,” his sister corrects, “but moving out, yes.”

Then, quieter, “You’re just going to leave us alone with Dad?”

“I’m sorry,” she says. “But you, of all people, know I can’t stay here any longer.” Her voice is soft, thoughtful.

“I’ve finally found where I belong.”

Leo frowns, but knows what she means. Even though they’d never really been a coherent, functional family, she’d once confessed to him that she felt like the odd one out. Leo can remember, multiple times, someone mistaking Camilla for a family friend because her hair was dark while the rest of theirs were blond.

And it’s not like he felt any different, growing up under the shadow of his huge older brother, who looks nothing like him and also happens to be studying law at an Ivy League school.

He can’t think of anything to say in response.

“You can always call me when something happens,” Camilla reminds him, and he nods, even though the reassurance doesn’t comfort him like it should.

His sister looks at him for a moment more, then smiles.

“Take care, dear,” she says, pulling him in for an embrace. His head nestled against her shoulder, he suddenly feels too young and yet too old.

\-------------------

When Takumi and his family first moved into the house across the street after fourth grade, it was the summer before Xander left for Yale and their dad was still around and Leo was just starting to establish his niche in the neighborhood. All through the afternoon, he sat in his bedroom silently and watched them carry their boxes out of the moving truck. At dinner, Camilla mentioned, nonchalantly, that there was a new boy his age, and Leo locked himself up in his room and refused to come out.

Somehow, the next morning, he found himself lingering by his front door watching the boy and his younger sister water the flowers.

The boy looked up at him suspiciously, watering can still in hand. The first thing Leo noticed was his hair, which was an odd gray color that gleamed almost silver in the sunlight. And it was long. Only girls had long hair, he thought.

Leo looked him up and down, taking in his sun-tanned skin and calloused hands and scowling mouth.

“What're _you_ looking at?”

“Nothing,” Leo said, and they stared each other down until Camilla came calling for him inside the house.

He backed away, ashamed, vowing to return. The staring contests continued.

Then one time Takumi had the nerve to call him white trash, and Leo, offended, returned with some taunt about him having no dad. It was the wrong thing to say, he realized too late. Takumi jumped at him from his perch in the tree, and Leo punched him, and they went down flailing in a writhing mass of arms and legs.

Their older brothers, who were already friends and played football together with a bunch of other big, sweaty guys (of course, Leo thought grumpily), pulled them apart and made them apologize to each other in front of all their siblings. He’d never forget the disappointed look Xander gave him, not that it was any different from usual, or the way Elise cried and clung to Camilla, who was shaking her head slowly.

Later, when they were alone, Takumi came over and said grudgingly, without being prompted this time, “Sorry about your shoulder.”

“Sorry about your eye.”

They looked at each other, long and hard. Then Leo offered him a tentative smile and suddenly, somehow, they were friends.

It was Leo’s first fight, but not Takumi’s. When school started that fall, he learned that his new friend’s guarded attitude and abrasive words were directed toward anyone and everyone he locked eyes with. And Leo always ignored the heavy feeling in his gut whenever Takumi came to class with a fresh black eye or split lip, pretending to be thoroughly immersed in his books instead.

\--------------------

Home, Leo decides, is in Mikoto’s kitchen sipping a cup of tea, unmindful of the changing landscape around him.

This is the house he more or less grew up in: the traditional Japanese scrolls hanging on the walls and the potted plants growing by the front door, the clean, simple furniture, the sunbathed garden in the backyard. Even though he’s been here hundreds of times, the scenery never changes, a reassuring symbol of constancy in a shifting world.

He’d knocked on the door looking for Takumi, whom he later learned was at archery practice, and Mikoto had invited him in for old times’ sake.

“Are you happy?”

The question catches him off guard and Leo almost spills his tea. She’s sitting across the table from him, watching him like a hawk and unnerving him no less than when Takumi does it all the time. Now he finally knows where the skill comes from.

“Yeah,” he says without thinking.

Mikoto’s gaze doesn’t waver. “Truly?”

“I don’t know,” he confesses at last. “Mostly, I guess. It’s just…” How should he put it? “Everything is going way too fast.”

She laughs.

“You can handle it,” she says with such certainty in her voice that he puts the teacup down and stares at her.

“I’m not worried about you, Leo.” She’s gazing out at the garden, a soft smile on her face that, Leo thinks, looks just the slightest bit sad. “If you and Takumi survived falling off the apple tree when you were little, you can survive anything.”

Her words have a certain weight to them, and Leo knows she isn’t just being nice. Mikoto means what she says.

Sometimes he thinks Takumi’s mother has more faith in him than he does himself.

Mikoto stands. He watches her take the plastic wrap off the cobbler on the counter and serve him a piece, and when she smiles at him and tells him to eat up, he feels like he’s eight years old all over again, just a kid ready to take on the world.

\--------------------

In the dying afternoon light, Takumi's hair looks strange, almost aflame, tinged with gold in the yellow-fading-orange sun.

Leo notices this not because he watches him all the time or anything, but because they’re tending to the flowers in Takumi’s backyard and the sun on his hair and skin is so blinding he can’t look away. For the first time in a long while, Leo lets his gaze linger. Takumi is built strong and sturdy and tanned from hours of archery practice in the sun, darker than before he left, nothing like Leo’s own pale, gangly appearance.

He wonders if Takumi has ever been teased about his hair. It’s long and silky-looking in a feminine way, but there is an air to him that is firm, grounded, undeniably masculine.

"Is there something on my face?"

"Huh?"

"Why d'you keep staring at me?"

"Um, sorry." Leo flushes and turns away, his mouth dry. Takumi says nothing, just watches him closely in that way of his. Leo tries not to squirm under his gaze.

Out of nowhere, he says, “Don’t cut that!” and Leo realizes that, without thinking, he’s poised to cut off the stem of one of the chrysanthemums. Quickly, he recovers, blaming it on the sun. It feels warm on his skin and he wonders how Takumi can stand spending so much time outside, because they’ve hardly been out for half an hour and Leo can already feel his skin burning.

“What’s up with you today? You seem out of it.”

“Just thinking,” Leo says.

“You’re always thinking,” Takumi replies, nonplussed.

After a prolonged silence, Leo snips a branch off the blackberry bush and asks, “Has Hinoka moved out yet?” He keeps his eyes down, pretending it’s nothing more than harmless curiosity.

Takumi frowns. “Not yet. She’s staying with us this summer.” Then, “Why?”

Leo’s almost about to lie and say never mind, when he remembers. This is Takumi he’s talking to. Takumi, who’s always listened to everything he’s had to say. Who, during their sophomore year, asked no questions and let him sleep over after Leo called him at one in the morning when his dad came home drunk and violent.

“Camilla’s moving out,” Leo confesses to the azaleas.

“For good?” Even though he’s turned away, Leo can almost see Takumi’s eyes widening with the inflection in his voice.

“Yeah.” Leo cuts another branch, harder than he has to. “She’s not coming back. I don’t think she could stand our family issues anymore. And honestly,” he continues to the flowers, not knowing where all these words are coming from, “it’s not like I blame her or anything, because I would probably do the exact same thing. It’s just—it feels like she never even _cared_ in the first place.”

Takumi is silent for a moment. Leo imagines him pausing, crouched over the flowers with his watering can.

“Leo—”

“Takumi—”

Takumi shuts up immediately. The situation would’ve been funny if they had been talking about anything else, Leo thinks. He forces himself to continue, hating how weak he sounds.

“You don’t… You wouldn’t leave, would you?”

A pause.

“Leo,” Takumi says seriously, “if I wanted to, I could have. All this time. And you wouldn’t be in our backyard right now.”

Leo chances a glance over at him, and he’s staring back with such intensity that Leo shivers and looks away, feeling his cheeks heat up.

“Although I should probably kick you out now, because you’re ruining the flowers,” Takumi says as an afterthought.

Leo stares at him. The light is shifting and shadows are lengthening across the yard, yet Takumi he remains, hair afire and features radiant under the red-pink sky. For the first time, Leo looks at his best friend in an entirely different way. Takumi’s as familiar as the plants in his garden and the aroma of Mikoto’s cooking wafting in from the kitchen, yet somehow dangerous; Leo can feel it in his bones.

Then he realizes Takumi’s peering at him closely, eyes dyed amber in the fading light. “Are you really okay?”

His face is right there. Suddenly, Leo thinks about what Camilla said: _I’ve finally found where I belong._ Is this where he belongs, too?

Leo presses his lips to Takumi’s, experimentally.

Takumi is warm like the sun, he realizes with some surprise, and tastes like the strawberries he’d been eating minutes before. Almost desperately, Leo presses closer, not out of want but of need.

Takumi doesn’t jerk away like he was fearing, just sits there shock-still for a few seconds before he finally kisses back, his fingers brushing over Leo’s face and into his hair with a curious fascination.

Leo pulls away first, heart racing and mind swimming in a hazy blur. “Was that okay?” he asks anxiously.

Vaguely, he registers Takumi nod.

\--------------------

“Owww.”

“Stop moving, you’ll just make it worse.”

Takumi’s eyebrows scrunched up when he was worried. It was a funny look on him, ten-year-old Leo decided, and unbidden, a laugh bubbled up in his throat. Then he immediately regretted it.

“Ow! That hurts!”

“I told you not to move!” Takumi scowled.

They’d been swinging in the swing in Takumi’s backyard and it had been all fun and games, until Takumi had decided it would be a good idea to have two people go at the same time. If it weren’t for him, Leo thought resentfully, he wouldn’t be sprawled out on the grass right now, clutching his arm. But like always, he couldn’t bring himself to be angry.

Besides, it felt nice to be fussed over, for once. Takumi and Sakura and Camilla were hunched over him, Takumi trying (and failing) to disguise his concern, while Sakura bandaged up his wrist with some gauze Hinoka found in the kitchen. Ryoma was trying to comfort Elise, who was sobbing uncontrollably, and Xander was left to pace helplessly around the backyard.

Later, after Xander and Ryoma had a shouting match over whose fault it was and Xander finally decided they’d all go home, Leo whispered, “Xander?”

It was incredible how fast his brother turned to look at him. Maybe Leo should get hurt more often. “Yeah?”

“Don’t tell Dad, okay?”

His brother didn’t say anything, just frowned. He seemed to be frowning a lot, these days. He was practically an adult already.

"Xander?"

Their dad would come home later that night to find Leo in his room, icing his broken wrist. Then Xander would betray them all by telling him every detail of the afternoon’s events, and their dad would promptly decide that his children were never to play with Mikoto’s family again and that he’d have to teach her son a lesson.

Leo would resist, and the resulting bruise under his right eye would be worth it. Even now, it still scares him to think about what would've happened to Takumi instead.

\--------------------

“Are you sure this is safe?”

“Yeah, I’ve been up here hundreds of times.”

When Leo hesitates, Takumi looks back at him impatiently. “You’re not _scared_ , are you?” The expression on his face looks dangerously close to laughter, Leo thinks.

“Of course not,” he lies, and keeps climbing.

By this point he’s forgotten why he even agreed to this in the first place, his blind trust in Takumi the only thing enough to keep him going. That and his stubborn pride. Takumi would never let him hear the end of it if he chickened out now.

“You’re shaking,” Takumi points out once they’ve reached the top.

“No I'm not,” Leo scowls self-righteously, trying to retain the last shred of his dignity.

“Uh huh.”

“Shut up.”

He really should stop agreeing to everything Takumi says.

They’re dangling their feet off the flat part of Takumi’s roof, gazing out at the sleeping town before them. The shingles are smooth and firm under Leo’s palms and the night air is cool on his face, and grudgingly, he admits it’s not a bad view. The streets are empty and the night is silent except for faint sounds of laughter coming from the house beneath them and the soft noises of cricketsong drifting up from the backyard.

Takumi leans back with his hands behind his hand and Leo swings his bare feet, saying nothing. The star-scattered sky stretches out before him, an endless expanse extending farther than he could ever imagine, and for a second he feels almost lost. Then Takumi’s hand finds his, their fingers intertwining without a word. His hand is calloused, scarred from picking too many fights when they were younger.

Leo rubs Takumi's palm absently, proud of knowing the origin of every scar, but ashamed he wasn’t able to prevent a single one.

“Do you wanna go back down?” Takumi asks anxiously, noticing Leo’s shaking fingers.

“No, I like it up here,” Leo says, even though they’re really high up and it’s one of the rare occasions everyone is together in the same house at once. Xander’s back in town for a few days, and Camilla is staying for the end of the summer before she returns to New York. But he’s content being up here alone with Takumi, breathing in the fresh air.

“Hey, did you know Oboro has a crush on you?” Leo says, just to distract himself from how far they are off the ground.

“ _What_?” Takumi turns to look at him disbelievingly, eyes wide. Starlight flickers across his face.

“You never noticed?” Leo can’t stop the ridiculous smile that spreads across his face. Takumi huffs.

“Are you actually being serious right now? How come you never told me?”

“Uh, it was obvious,” Leo says, “to everyone but you. Haven’t you ever caught her staring at you in class?”

Takumi falls silent, thinking. His fingers are warm against Leo’s own. “I mean, I _have_ , but… I can’t believe I never—” he begins, then shakes his head. “This is too weird. I’ve never thought of her like…like _that_. I’m just going to pretend you never told me anything.”

Leo only realizes he’s smirking when Takumi punches his arm, and then he instantly regrets it. His punches _hurt_.

“Ugh. I hate you.” But Takumi’s laughing, a soft, ringing sound that makes Leo’s head feel light.

Huh.

Without thinking, Leo turns to look at the stars reflected in Takumi’s eyes and threading silver through his hair, bright and ethereal and almost dizzying.

“Takumi?” he begins, hesitantly.

“Yeah?” The speed at which Takumi turns to look at him makes him feel warm inside. He flounders for a moment, uncertain.

“Never mind.”

He doesn’t have to say it aloud. Takumi knows. The words are unspoken and yet as clear as day, echoed by years of late-night talks and video games and sleeping over and finally coming to the realization that _there’s someone else like me._

The world is so big and there are a million things they have still to discover, and yet, somehow, it's here that Leo finally feels at peace.


End file.
